I believe it was Aristotle who said that wonder is the beginning of philosophy and Emerson who contended that stars are the daily bread of the soul. Great minds seem to make time for musing on life’s mystery.
As I write these words, beams from the sunrise are streaming from behind my shoulder. There were ages when the entire village would have risen to greet this miracle, but on this morning, the entire village seems to be dutifully entering the ramp of the nearby interstate highway. I can see people move their visors to block the irritating rays of the morning sun. I can imagine them mindlessly turning on the car radio, and moving like granules of an amoebae into the heart of the city.
This absence of wonder produces an enormous poverty in our lives. Nothing else in life quite fills that void. For many, the world seems to have lost its luster, but it is our own eyes that have grown dull. “The one who cannot wonder,” Carlyle claimed, “is but a pair of Spectacles behind which there is no eye.”
It is not enough to console ourselves with miraculous stories of how some religious hero calmed the storm or was lifted to the sky. Our souls hunger to experience miracles of our own. And, in fact, miracle stories were intended to meet just that need. It is not that Jesus was physically lifted into the sky, but that the minds of the disciples were lifted to see Christ everywhere. It’s not that Jesus changed the weather pattern, but that the disciples learned to see the peace of God in the middle of their storms. The stories of scripture were not written to teach use about magical people and places somewhere else. They are intended to inspire us so we can move to greet this day with reverence and awe.
It is a poor imagination which can only see the miraculous in violations of nature. If we go out to the nearest woods and really listen, we will soon be overwhelmed by the intelligence expressed in that spot. Looking in the eyes of a beloved pet, we soon feel an eerie sense of intelligence that transcends our ordinary perspective. To wonder at such things is the very food of our souls.
Monsanto, like many corporations, is a soulless predatory machine. The machine built only to make money. It considers denying its own pollution and settling wrongful death lawsuits to be a cost of doing business.
Monsanto is currently helping fund a campaign in California to convince voters that some food labeling is a bad idea. It isn’t an easy sell, but Henry Miller is doing a bang up job. Monsanto and other pesticide companies are paying him to convince voters that any attempt to find out if there are pesticides in their foods is actually a ploy by fat cat lawyers to make a buck off the back of hardworking companies like Monsanto.
Henry Miller is the perfect face for the campaign. He has defended DDT, and worked to discredit the scientific links between tobacco and cancer. He has claimed that some amount of leakage from the nuclear industry might have health benefits. Oh, and he also works on climate change denial.
So if you’re looking for a scary Halloween costume, click on the link below. Frankenstein had nothing on these guys.
http://www.alternet.org/food/meet-man-monsanto-and-friends-hired-lie-you-about-your-food
What irony! At a recent conference on energy a representative from Saudi Arabia announced that they plan to move to 100% renewable sources of energy. Needless to say, we are still betting on the fossils.
Just as the English empire unknowingly sealed its fate by choosing to bet on coal (I assume because that’s what the rich minority made money off of) so has the American empire time dated itself if it does not disconnect itself from non-renewable sources of energy.
But there is hope. Whereas Mitt Romney’s energy plan entails fracking, blasting and off shore drilling, Obama’s energy policy, while nowhere as progressive as Norway, Germany and now possibly Saudi Arabia, it still has fostered investments in wind and solar. The fact that such energy is more expensive and still suffers disastrous failures from time to time is completely and totally irrelevant in the long run. “Renewables”are our only lifeboat from the sinking ship of fossil fuel based economies.
To read more, click here:
http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/17592-saudi-arabia-reveals-plans-to-be-powered-entirely-by-renewables-while-fossil-fuels-dictate-u-s-energy-policy
Part of the reason I love studying religion, is that I love the quirkiness of human perception. For me “metaphysics” is not about studying some unknowable other realm, but trying to intuitively explore the strange mysterious membrane between our conscious mind and the material substrate from which it emerges.
Our bodies respond to the world metaphorically. “Up” seems good or important, “down” seems bad or “lowly.” Going “forward” seems like progress, going “backward” feels like we are “losing ground.” “Hot” feels more like anger, “cool” like being calm. And the list goes on.
Even colors can evoke feelings. We can view that effect as as a meaningless quirk, but perhaps it contains some information written into our tissue about our place in the web of life. If butterflies can be guided by color, perhaps there is something it can teach us, too. The following link is a scientific ode to the color blue. It asks question like, why is blue so calming? Why is it the most popular color? Why is it linked with being sad? To read link, click here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/science/with-new-findings-scientists-are-captivated-by-the-color-blue.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hpw
It’s called “depleted uranium.” It is wonderful for piercing armor and bunkers. DU is just one of the toxic substances that remain as a poisonous footprint long after our troops have left. Lead and mercury are also contaminants that kill long after the conflict has ended and we have forgotten the name of the place where the bonbing happened.
In Basra, where we dropped 800 tons of bombs, and expended over a million bullets, babies began to be born with enlarged heads and eyes and defective hearts.
In Falluja, doctors reported that out of the 170 born one month, one fourth of them died within a week. Three quarters of the dead babies were deformed. A follow up study reported that the increases birth defects and infant deaths in Falluja were higher than in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In 2010, the University of Ulster reported that increases in congenital birth defects, leukemia and infant mortality in Falluja were higher than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
One scientist said, “a clear footprint of metal in the population” in Falluja and Basra. “There is compelling evidence linking the staggering increases in Iraqi birth defects to neurotoxic metal contamination following the repeated bombardments. There is no other explanation. There has been no volcano eruption, for example.”
The author then concludes: “These studies should be required reading for anyone who still wonders why the Arab and Muslim world remains so angry at America and its allies.”
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1274727–american-bombing-of-iraq-left-legacy-of-deformed-babies-siddiqui
Huffington Post has reported that a study of the US military found that demographics have changed dramatically. Perhaps it was the questionable wars, or perhaps it was the broken promises, but the military is no longer a conservative monolythic whole.
While officers still tend to vote overwhelmingly Republican, the enlisted soldiers look very much like the general population.
“Seared by a decade of war and service in a military force that is more ethnically and racially diverse — and includes openly gay troops — more than two million Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are powering a shift in electoral politics.”
According to a Reuters study, less than one third of those polled said the Iraq war ended successfully. 42 Percent said the US should leave Afghanistan. Over half said “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies were a mistake.
Surprisingly, military service by a presidential candidate is no longer necessary to many soldiers.
“Some presidents who were excellent as generals weren’t very good as presidents — “Grant, for instance,” said Anne Rawley, a retired Navy captain. “We’ve had excellent wartime presidents with no military background — Lincoln and Roosevelt.”
The number one issues important to veterans? According to this poll it is: access to health care, education, housing and other benefits.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/veterans-skeptical-presidential-politics-parties_n_1988378.html
“Put everything to the test, hold fast to that which is good.” –St. Paul, 1 Thess. 5:21
“Believe nothing merely because you have been told it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher, his age or wisdom. But if after due examination and analysis, you find it to be kind, conducive to the benefit and welfare of all beings, then take that doctrine as your guide.” —The Buddha
Many people assume religion is irrational by its very nature. It can be claimed that many, if not most religious people, belong to a faith that asks them not to question certain assumptions or to disobey certain authorities. But does religion have to be that way?
Would not the skeptical atheism of Buddha violate that simple view of religion as irrational belief? Would the Sabbath violations of Jesus not refute the idea that he was teaching unquestioning obedience?
Toward the end of his life, Paul left an admonition to the Philippians to dwell on whatever is true and beautiful and good. To me, that implies that he considered scripture to be the first word in a conversation, not the last.
“IT’S BEEN SEVEN MONTHS since I’ve been inside a prison cell. Now I’m back, sort of. The experience is eerily like my dreams, where I am a prisoner in another man’s cell. Like the cell I go back to in my sleep, this one is built for solitary confinement. I’m taking intermittent, heaving breaths, like I can’t get enough air. This still happens to me from time to time, especially in tight spaces. At a little over 11 by 7 feet, this cell is smaller than any I’ve ever inhabited. You can’t pace in it.”
What I want to tell Acosta is that no part of my experience—not the uncertainty of when I would be free again, not the tortured screams of other prisoners—was worse than the four months I spent in solitary confinement. What would he say if I told him I needed human contact so badly that I woke every morning hoping to be interrogated? Would he believe that I once yearned to be sat down in a padded, soundproof room, blindfolded, and questioned, just so I could talk to somebody?
Bauer realizes he cannot explain to a free person that the differences are in the little details:
….Do I point out that I had a mattress, and they have thin pieces of foam; that the concrete open-air cell I exercised in was twice the size of the “dog run” at Pelican Bay, which is about 16 by 25 feet; that I got 15 minutes of phone calls in 26 months, and they get none; that I couldn’t write letters, but they can; that we could only talk to nearby prisoners in secret, but they can shout to each other without being punished; that unlike where I was imprisoned, whoever lives here has to shit at the front of his cell, in view of the guards?
“There was a window,” I say. I don’t quite know how to tell him what I mean by that answer. “Just having that light come in, seeing the light move across the cell, seeing what time of day it was—” Without those windows, I wouldn’t have had the sound of ravens, the rare breezes, or the drops of rain that I let wash over my face some nights. My world would have been utterly restricted to my concrete box, to watching the miniature ocean waves I made by sloshing water back and forth in a bottle; to marveling at ants; to calculating the mean, median, and mode of the tick marks on the wall; to talking to myself without realizing it. For hours, days, I fixated on the patch of sunlight cast against my wall through those barred and grated windows.
He says that solitary confinement in Iran broke him completely and reduced him to “sobbing and rocking to the beat of my heart, it was the patch of sunlight that brought me back.” Then he points out that here, in this US prision, there are no windows.
Bauer realizes he has only been allowed to speak to prisoners who have informed on other prisoners. He askes to speak to someone from the general population and is refused.
If you would like to read the whole article, click here:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/solitary-confinement-shane-bauer
If you would like to learn how you can help get books to Texas prisoners, click here:
Scientists from the University of Western Ontario used satellite radar data to determine that an 2011 earthquake in Lorca Spain appears to have been triggered by human activity. It looks like the earthquake would have eventually happened anyway, but human activities like fracking may be enough to trigger such events to happen sooner rather than later.
Obviously, earthquakes cannot always be avoided. One scientist in the study said that even rain can trigger enough imbalance to start the process
The study warns that, in certain earthquake prone areas, many human activities that change the water table may be enough to trigger slippage of a tectonic plate. Such activities such as fracking, borehole drilling, and quarrying need to be done considering the larger consequences.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20025807
It is one of the most famous quotes in all of science.
They are the words Einstein said in horror at the randomness of quantum mechanics, “Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the “old one.” I, at any rate, am convinced that (God) does not throw dice.”
Einstein didn’t believe in God in the traditional sense. He used the symbol more as shorthand framework from which to speak of the universe in terms that are meaningful in our ordinary human experience. His point seemed to be that he couldn’t imagine randomness in a universe he wanted to see as a mathematical matrix. But Einstein lost that debate. Now every honest thinker must adjust to the fact of randomness in our universe.
Perhaps it is helpful to look at dice themselves. Nothing controls the roll of the dice, but the opposite sides of the dice always add up to seven. In dice, as in cards, there are patterns that a gambler learns and over time knowing the patterns make all the difference. Perhaps the universe has such constants built into what appears as random. Perhaps wisdom consists less in holding onto the belief that every event in life is predetermined, and more in learning the patterns. Perhaps the universe is like a casino where each roll of the dice is random but, over time, the house always wins.
It is understandable that Einstein would have an initial difficulty in accepting randomness, but the discovery that we are not cosmic puppets can actually be quite thrilling. No one complains of randomness on their way to Las Vegas.